Reliving your childhood, NetRetro

What was better, the past or present for TV, Music, Comics, Toys, Sweets etc?

Prisoner? Mary Mungo Midge? Thunderbirds? Captain Scarlet? Monty Python? Two Ronnies? Rent-a-ghost? Not The Nine O'Clock News? Dynasty? Dallas? Red Dwarf? Tripods? Fawlty Towers? Star Trek? Wonder Woman? Muppets? Spiderman? Smurfs? Munsters? Twilight Zone? Six Million Dollar Man? Man From Atlantis? Goons? The Snow Queen? Singing Ringing Tree? Space 1999? UFO? Time Tunnel? Tarzan? Hectors House? Blue Peter? Babar? The Young Ones? Deputy Dawg? Knightmare? Monkey? Morecambe & Wise?

These are just a few I've collated for my kids and open to all here to enjoy and add to here.

As my kids grow up I constantly found myself comparing past and present. I'd tell them about what my brother and I watched on first black & white and then colour TV, but it wasn't until I started compiling all my childhood memories into one site that I decided to set up (NetRetro.Net) that they then started to get really interested and although they still love their Wii, Hannah Montana, CBBC, 21st century lifestyle they now so enjoy what I found so compelling, imaginative and funny when I was their age.

NetRetro started out as a repository for all my best memories, from my childhood, but has grown to include what I loved into my teens and twenties, so on, and my kids love it. It's with thanks to sites like YouTube I've been able to find shows, adverts, all sorts of things that for years have been nothing more than distant memories and relive them all over again.

My eldest calls it her favourite website and moans at me when I haven't added anything new for a while. It's also got her interested in lots more than TV shows, things like old comics for example, Beano, Dandy, Whizzer & Chips and fuelled an interest in Airfix and Meccano.

Although the site was at first just for my family, we opened it out to more people and hoped it might become a social library where everyone could share memories of their favourite shows, music, sweets, toys, playground crazes and grow it ever more. So if you have anything you'd like to share please do and pass on its name to your friends & work colleagues.

Alas, some of the videos I've pulled in from YouTube and other sites have subsequently been taken down by their owners, but I'm constantly amazed at what people have been able to find and put on the Net and each month I try and add a few more clips or whole series for everyone's enjoyment.

Feel free to check it out... Latest videos are also on the bottom right of the BeckenhamTown.us website, another way to find the site too if you have bookmarked and regularly come back here.

Enjoy and share your favourite memories too.